Can Mobile Save Warner Music?
At the international mobile confab 3GSM in Spain yesterday Warner Music Gro
up announced several new deals with leading mobile operators to deliver WMG music across the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. This follow recent WMG mobile deals in Japan, South 
Korea, Russia, China and Latin America.
At the same gathering WMG head Edgar Bronfman Jr. decried the barriers created by the cost and complexity of current mobile music delivery systems "It’s expensive, it’s complicated and
it’s slow," he said. "It’s amazing that we’ve generated as much revenue as we have given how
cumbersome the experience can be…So many platforms aren’t capable of even the most basic content configurations, like a track bundled with a video". The executive praised Apple’s iPhone for raising the bar even prior to release.
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This is another one of those move that looks good right now, but in the long run is a boneheaded strategy for the big labels.
1. phone carrier will demand exclusivity soon enough. (what’s the point of paying expensive entry fee in the the music club when everybody can the same music everywhere.)
2. After that the big label will go right into the same “Apple” trap. except this time they are dealing with even bigger animal, telco giants. instead of Apple.
..in the end I think, telco will simply swallow the big labels, just like big TV/media swallow record labels.
The direction is already here, with ATT unity service or what not.
ATT will own monopoly on content delivery and they will demand A LOT.
Warner is asking at least one mobile operator to invest in them as a JV. So in that sense, mobile can save Warner. But through selling music? Only if they figure out how to stop p2p, side-loading and bluetooth.
“..in the end I think, telco will simply swallow the big labels, just like big TV/media swallow record labels.”
In South Korea, this is already happening – South Korea’s top mobile phone operator SK Telecom owns 60 percent of Seoul Records, the country’s largest record company. The mobile/music market is more developed there than in North America so it may certainly happen here in time.